swestrup | Good Article on Climate Change.

I'm in the skeptic's camp when it comes to the whole question of human-induced global warming. Its not that I don't think that there are strange climactic shifts happening around us. I just don't buy that we're able to model the climate well enough to attribute this change to human activity. There are too many variables, and I've looked at the fudge-factors snuck into too many computer models to believe that we yet have any idea what's actually going on. Now, it MAY be that we've managed to do enough environmental harm that we've shifted off of a fixed point in the climate, or it may be caused by a change in solar output, or it may be due to a natural long-term oscillation in the planet's climate. We simply don't have enough knowledge or information to know for sure, despite what folks on both sides of the debate are hotly claiming.

Anyway, here is another interesting data point, that says that the climate got abruptly very wonky about 5200 years ago, and that similar things seem to be happening now. Its easy to imagine that they have a common cause (which would pretty much rule out humans as the culprit), but its just as easy to imagine that different perturbing forces can cause the same response form the planet's climate system. We just don't know.